Author
Topic: Forum Merging (Read 3596 times)

As a forum owner, I'm sure you understand how hard it is to keep an active community, especially when starting a new forum. People will be reluctant to post because of no-one else discussing, and they may look for a larger community to voice their opinions.

I'm looking to start a project that will let multiple forum owners merge their forums (with at least 1000+ posts each, as to not be a waste of time), to one large general discussion forum running the latest version of SMF 2.0. This will ensure an active and large community, letting each forum owner be part of a much larger project.

Sure, any forum owner signing up to this won't have as much control over their forum as they did before, as there will be multiple administrators and everything will have to be managed very carefully as to ensure all of them are happy with how the site is set up, but it comes with many bonuses too that you wouldn't necessarily have had before.

Benefits

Forum run on a Dedicated Server.

No worries about server, domain renewal, script licensing, or any other costs.

Not the only person dedicated to working on the community, several other forum owners will be.

Being part of a much larger project than your forum as it was before.

To start this off, I'll be throwing in two of my gaming forums (one focussing on FPS, the other on flash), totalling about 50,000 posts.

If you're interested, feel free to PM me so we can discuss it more. We will need to come up with a suitable agreeable name.

There are scripts for MyBB, vBulletin, and a couple of other ones that let forum databases be merged, handling all of that itself. The databases could quite easily be merged into eachother using that, and then converted back into SMF.

sorry, but - as you may notice form our conversions board, there are almost always issues with conversions.

So, converting to another software and then back to SMF seems like a HUGE amount of effort that will be fraught with problems.

If you really want to do this (although, honestly, I can't see any reason for anyone to actually take you up on it), then I would recommend that you find a programmer willing to write a merge script just for SMF->SMF

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You need to merge both sites into a MyBB database using their merge tool, then convert back to SMF.

However, if you put topics from both boards in the same categories to get rid of duplicate categories, then they will not be sorted properly. SMF sorts by latest post ID, not by latest post date (I tried). Also you could lose some info during the SMF->MyBB->SMF transition.

In my case, duplicate IDs and wrong date order was not a big issue, because the board we were merging with our current one only had posts from before the current one existed. As a result, the current webmaster did some tweaking to allow negative topic/post IDs to exist, but I would only recommend such thing if you had a similar scenario as we had (which I doubt is the case) and if you want current topic/post links to remain intact (by not bumping up their IDs with a merge). Some of our members refer to those old posts as the "Minus World", like the glitch in Super Mario Bros.

in my case, i would only merg members en post to 1 forum. thinking of put all the topics(from the forum what ended) first in 1 new board and some members who exist on both forums give first al extra letter (like xdave/dave) en merge them later on.Should dat be possible? anyone?